Natural History of British Zoophytes. 81 



bility of the illustration is not so very plain. Still it is inapplica- 

 ble, for buds grow from the absorption of water and inorganic mat- 

 ter which is diffused and assimilated by means of a certain deter- 

 minate organization, while the covering of zoophytes receives no in- 

 crease except through the medium of its polypes ; — it has no sap- 

 vessels, no spiral tubes, no cellular parenchyma, no absorbent roots, 

 no pores and spiracles on the surface, so that all its material must 

 be derived from an internal source ; and to say that a body vege- 

 tates when the nutriment is received and assimilated in a different 

 manner and by a different structure from what it is in plants, and 

 is productive in its assimilation of opposite principles, is to use 

 terms in so vague a sense as would be intolerable in any science. 



Neither the authority of Linnaeus, nor the imperfect experiments 

 of Baster had any effect on Ellis, who steadily opposed this vegeto- 

 animal doctrine, and whose superior knowledge made it easy for him 

 to detect and point out the erroneousness of the observations on which 

 it principally rested. In reference to the opinion itself he wrote to 

 Linnaeus, — ' f artful people may puzzle the vulgar, and tell us that 

 the more hairy a man is, and the longer his nails grow, he is more 

 of a vegetable than a man who shaves his hair or cuts his nails ;* 

 that frogs bud like trees, when they are tadpoles ; and caterpillars 

 blossom into butterflies. These are pretty rhapsodies for a Bonnet. 

 Though there are different manners of growth in the different parts 

 of the same animal, which the world has long been acquainted with, 

 why should we endeavour to confound the ideas of vegetable and 

 animal substances, in the minds of people that we would willingly 

 instruct in these matters ?"t And in a subsequent letter he repeats, 

 " I cannot reconcile myself to vegetating animals : the introduction 

 of the doctrine of this mixed kind of life will only confuse our ideas 

 of Nature. We have not proof sufficient to determine it j and I am 

 averse to hypotheses.''^ 



* Bohadsch in answer to those who believed that the Pennatulae were plants 

 uses the same argument — De Anim. Mar. p. 123. This author, who wrote in 

 1761, was a strenuous advocate for the unmixed animality of zoophytes. 



f Lin. Corresp. Vol. i. p. 226. \ Ibid. p. 260. 



(To be continued. ) 



No. I. 



